It doesn’t matter about socioeconomics, or race, or whatever factors you want to insert here: kids of all ages want, almost clamor for, the same thing. They want rigor and choice and someone that helps them to think and to learn and communicate with others. They want someone who listens to them, validates where they are, and then moves them forward.
Our students want us teachers to bring texts, rich discussions, complex ideas and emotions into their lives in the safety of the classroom culture. Last year I read R. J. Palacio’s novel Wonder aloud to the class. I looked up after I’d read the final sentence in one of the last chapters to see more than half the class in tears. Then the tears turned to cheers at how the protagonist overcame such incredible odds. This is a book that unfolds gradually, but without spoiling it, the main character, August, is unlike any other children and my students empathize with him as he’s ostracized because of genetics giving him the short straw. The principal is presenting year-end awards and uses Henry Ward Beecher’s words on greatness. “‘Greatness,’ wrote Beecher, ‘lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength … He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts.’” As the principal finishes, the last sentence reads, “So will August Pullman please come up here to receive this award?” My students understood—Auggie’s quiet greatness, his outlook on life, his perseverance all prevailed. And they had lived with August throughout the adversity.
This book will stay with my students. The story, the lessons, the empathy. This is one of many powerful books we read, in a list that could go on and on. But they will remember Auggie Pullman perhaps most of all. “Thank you for making me go to school,” Auggie said.
I want all our students to say that—every day! And I believe that the Common Core Standards can create the kind of conditions in our classrooms that lead students to say that, to revere school. The standards are “bookish,” “intellectual” and despite or because of their rigor, they’re about ensuring students’ engagement.
So before I move on to an overview of how this book is organized, I want to give you a metaphor of how I envision this book serving you. Jim Burke uses a metaphor of a compass in his introduction of The Common Core Companion, a wonderful metaphor.
For this book, I offer you this image:
The image was sent by a friend of mine as I was working on the final section of this book, with a brief note, “The silhouetted hands made me think of students leaning in with raised hands. With the standards, aren’t all students supposed to be thinking and participating?”
Bingo. I had my metaphor. The standards and in turn the suggestions in this book are a mere outline of how you might begin. The book allows you to color, contour, and add texture to the teaching and learning that I charcoal-outlined in these pages.
A Brief Orientation to The Common Core Companion: The Standards Decoded, Grades 3–5
When I was asked to write The Common Core Companion: The Standards Decoded, Grades 3–5, I was thrilled to follow Jim Burke’s design and the standard his first two books set. He envisioned this series and blazed the trail, with the help of teachers, curriculum supervisors, and superintendents who he has worked with around the country.
Jim’s words in his orientation are applicable to the elementary setting, too:
As is true for all of us, administrators have come to the job of leading with their sense of what their role is or should be; past experience, along with their training and education, has given them this orientation. Now administrators and teachers such as yourself find their role being redefined, the demands on them and their time being dramatically restructured, often in ways that cause some sense of disorientation, as if all your previous experience, all your knowledge, was suddenly suspect, leaving you to navigate this new era without a working compass. Eventually, as we know, we get our bearings, find the star by which we might chart our course, and realize that much of what we already know and value does still, in fact, apply to the task at hand, that it certainly need not be tossed overboard.
So, in other words “we don’t toss out the baby with the bathwater.” This book is for you, whether you are an administrator or teacher, district curriculum supervisor, a professor or a student teacher training to join in the education field. The goal is to understand and make better use of the standards themselves, and to plan for how to implement them in the classroom using best instructional practices.
Key features include the following:
A one-page overview of all the anchor standards. Designed for quick reference or selfassessment, this one-page document offers a one-stop place to see all the English Language Arts Common Core Standards. In addition to using this to quickly check the Common Core anchor standards, grade-level teachers or the whole faculty might use them to evaluate which standards they know and are addressing effectively and which ones they need to learn and teach.
Side-by-side anchor standards translation. The CCSS College Readiness anchor standards for each category—reading, foundational skills, writing, speaking and listening, and language—appear in a two-page spread with the original Common Core anchor standards on the left and, on the right, their matching translations in language that is more accessible to those on the run or new to literacy instruction.
A new user-friendly format for each standard. Instead of the two reading standard domains—literature and informational text—spread throughout the CCSS document, here you will find the first reading standard for grades 3–5 and the two different domains all on one page. This allows you to use The Common Core Companion to see at a glance what Reading Standard 1 looks like in grades 3–5 across literature and informational texts. The design makes it easy to look at how the standard plays out across grade levels, so you can plan with teachers just how to increase complexity as students move from grade to grade.
Parallel translation/what the student does. Each standard opens to a two-page spread that has the original Common Core standards on the left and a parallel translation of each standard mirrored on the right-hand page in more accessible language (referred to as the “Gist”) so you can concentrate on how to teach in ways that meet the CCSS instead of how to understand them. These Gist pages align themselves with the original Common Core, so you can move between the two without turning a page as you think about what they mean and how to teach them. Also, beneath each translation of a standard appears a list of They Consider. These are brief practical questions that will help students “crack open” the thinking and comprehension skills being asked of them. Ultimately, students pose these questions for themselves—both unconsciously and deliberately—as they engage in the endeavor. But because metacognition is something children grow into, you can use these questions as comprehension questions to pose to students after you model how to approach them. The goal is to provide ample practice with these questions so that students internalize them, and own them as readers, writers, and thinkers. So be sure to incorporate them into the fabric of your instruction each and every day, having students talking, listening, and writing off of them.
Instructional techniques/what the teacher does. In the “What the Teacher Does” pages you will find a great many suggestions. Although I don’t always say “Put your students in groups” or “Put your students in pairs,” I can’t emphasize enough that the goal is to demonstrate less, and have students do — more. Periodically you will see references to online resources that provide graphic organizers, visuals, book lists, and other tools that support the teaching of the standard.
Preparing to teach templates. These templates serve as reminders, too, that teachers should be considering all these kinds of work every day when
